Them and us fishes, photo Suzanne Beishon (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
Have-yachts…
On a boat trip round Capri in Italy this summer, any guilt over how much we were spending on holiday disappeared – when we met a mini-fleet of superyachts flying union jacks.
It was probably more ships than the Royal Navy has now. I took down a couple of names, wondering whether I knew any of the owners, so might get invited on for a beer? Needless to say, I was disappointed.
These were charter yachts – so of course, any ordinary worker can hire them. All you need this winter for the ‘Naia’, for instance, is £443,459, plus expenses, per week. Of course, you can split the cost with up to eleven guests.
Jeremy Short
… have-nots
Meanwhile, 12.9 million people in the UK live in ‘absolute poverty’.
A June report by the House of Commons Library found one in five individuals had an income under 60% of the national median last financial year. The figure also takes into account housing costs and inflation.
3.7 million of those people are children. That’s 27% of all kids.
The Socialist has nothing against fancy food and cool submarines. What we object to is a system that limits the finer things to the super-rich minority while driving the rest of us into penury.
We say: take the wealth off the 1%! For public ownership of the top corporations, and democratic planning of production to meet the needs of all. Then we can end poverty for good – and maybe throw on some extra submarines for the summer hols.
